Spies Study Guide

Michael Frayn is a prolific playwright, novelist, and translator. After graduating from the University of Cambridge, where he studied philosophy, Frayn worked as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian and The Observer, writing satirical and comical pieces and publishing several novels on the side. He wrote The Tin Man (1965), the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award; The Russian Interpreter (1966), which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize; and Towards the End of the Morning (1967). His plays include Noises Off (1982), Benefactors (1984), and Copenhagen (1998), which won the 1998 Evening Standard Award for Best Play of the Year and the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play (USA). All the while, Frayn translated many works from Russian, including plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy. He is married to Claire Tomalin, a biographer and critic.

Frayn specifically sets his novel during World War II, presumably near the end of the war when Britain frequently carried out bombing raids over Germany. England declared war against Germany in 1939, and the war ended in 1945 with the Axis powers’ defeat. In addition to the violence and chaos on the battlefield, the war had a large effect at home—many men left their families at home to go fight around the world, and the war established a different kind of social structure, as it glorified those who served. In particular, the Royal Air Force (RAF), of which Uncle Peter was part, was one of the most important and glorified divisions in the British Army because it kept the country safe from invasion. However, the bombing runs were largely controversial because they indiscriminately killed civilians. Thus, the war plays an important role in structuring the novel and motivating the characters in different ways.

George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) utilizes a similar plot structure to Frayn’s novel by presenting the nostalgic narration of a protagonist who returns to his boyhood town and looks back on his past before and during World War II in London. Other titles, such as Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) and Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch (2006), explore the related themes and topics of children as spies and the effect of the war on life and love in London, respectively. Although set in the mid-19th century, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861) examines how the highly organized London society affects the personal development of its child protagonist, in much the same way that Frayn also engages with class differences in his own story. Finally, the way the novel explores the subjective and mysterious nature of memory through specific associations with various senses recalls some major themes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.